Department of Psychology, Yale University, 100 College St, New Haven, CT, USA.
Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, 100 College St, New Haven, CT, USA.
Nat Commun. 2024 Mar 19;15(1):2443. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46670-5.
The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient. Further, people integrate facial cues more for categories for which they most frequently encounter facial expressions in everyday life (e.g., happiness). People are also moderately stable over time in their reliance on situational cues and integration of cues and those who reliably utilize situation cues more also have better situated emotion knowledge. These findings underscore the importance of studying variability in reliance on and integration of cues.
对他人情绪状态进行细微推断的能力是社交功能的核心。虽然情绪推断既可以对面部动作做出敏感反应，也可以对其所处的情境做出敏感反应，但对于这两个信息源在情绪类别和个体之间何时进行整合，人们的了解相对较少。在一系列研究中，我们使用一个档案数据集和五个实证数据集来证明，人们可以进行整合，但仅凭情境知识就能很好（有时甚至更好）地捕捉到情绪推断，而孤立的面部线索则是不够的。此外，人们对面部线索的整合更多地用于他们在日常生活中最常遇到面部表情的类别（例如，幸福）。人们在时间上也会在依赖情境线索和整合线索方面保持适度的稳定，那些可靠地利用情境线索的人也具有更好的情境情绪知识。这些发现强调了研究对线索的依赖和整合的变异性的重要性。
